Because of the governor’s visit, Banks noted, “we were obliged to stay at home, so that unsought honor lost us very near the whole day. . . . We however contriv’d to revenge ourselves upon his excellency by an Electrical Machine which we had on board. Upon his expressing a desire to see it, we sent for it ashore—and shock’d him full as much as he chose.”12
NEAR THE EQUATOR, ATLANTIC OCEAN
October 1–26, 1768
Captain Cook and his crew and supernumeraries were not voyaging across the globe just to discover the solar system’s dimensions. They’d also been commissioned to test Britain’s most celebrated navigational breakthrough: Nevil Maskelyne’s Nautical Almanac. Together with four human computers (including Charles Green’s new brother-in-law William Wales) and the Almanac’s “corrector” Richard Dunthorne, Maskelyne had completed a Herculean task.
The debut Almanac of 1767—tabulating a stunning 15,500 solar, lunar, planetary, and stellar positional predictions—had been a midnight oil burner, falling far behind its publishing schedule and coming into print six days into the year it was forecasting. A thousand copies had been printed, which promptly found their way onto ships traversing the planet and into navigational schools in the United Kingdom, North America, and Europe.13
His book was stunning, but now Maskelyne faced the difficult task of bottling his lightning. How to repeat the same impossible labor year in and year out?
Having been satisfied that the team was indeed up to the job, the Board of Longitude authorized Maskelyne to spend whatever he felt he needed to produce almanacs for 1768 and 1769 and, in due course, into the 1770s as well. So Maskelyne hired more computers.14 The Astronomer Royal furthermore rewarded innovation among his team members, giving £50 bonuses to computer Israel Lyons and corrector Dunthorne for finding shortcuts in calculating tables concerning atmospheric phenomena like refraction.15
The board wanted the Endeavour to sail with almanacs for the whole of its projected voyage. Good as they were, Maskelyne’s computers hadn’t yet refined their methods well enough to forecast so far into the future. They did, however, provide Cook and Green with almanacs for 1768 and 1769. Green was becoming very familiar with them as the Endeavour followed the northeast trade winds down to the equator.
On Saturday, October 1, with a “fresh trade” at their back and a hazy cloud cover veiling the morning sun, Green and Cook met on Endeavour’s quarterdeck—the far back region behind the ship’s wheel and mizzenmast. With the swivel gun on its perch nearby, Green and Cook set up their sextants. Green’s, built by the same Jesse Ramsden who’d created Banks’s “electrical machine,” was a fifteen-inch brass device on loan from the Royal Society. Cook owned his own—a twenty-inch, wooden-framed brass instrument with a pole that steadied it to the deck.16
Between 7:19 and 9:02 AM, the pair of explorer-astronomers made thirty-two angular measurements of the moon and sun’s position. Green did most of the work. He found, for instance, the rising sun climbed from 21 degrees and 31 arc minutes to 45 degrees and 40 arc minutes over the 103-minute interval. The duo carried out multiple iterations of three repeated measurements of three values: the altitude of the moon’s upper limb above the horizon, the altitude of the sun’s lower limb and the angular separation between the nearest edges of the two bodies.17 At the level of precision their calculations demanded, they even needed to keep track of whether their altitude measurements came from the Endeavour’s quarterdeck (19–20 feet above the sea’s surface) or the main deck or forecastle (18 feet). The Nautical Almanac then provided instructions and charts necessary to transform these sundry quantities into mariner’s gold—longitude.
As Green found within thirty minutes of calculation, using inexpensive tools and methods that were coming into reach of practically any navigator on the planet, Endeavour lay at 14 degrees, 26 arc minutes north of the equator and 22 degrees, 47 arc minutes west of Greenwich. The world was becoming a smaller and more navigable place.
“In justice to Mr. Green,” Cook later wrote, “I must say that he was indefatigable in making and calculating these observations.” Cook also extolled Green’s teaching skills. “Several of the petty officers can make and calculate [lunar longitudes] almost as well as himself,” Cook continued. “It is only by this means that this method of finding the longitude at sea can be brought into universal practice—a method which we have found may be depended on to within a half a degree! Which is a degree of accuracy more than sufficient for all nautical purposes.” The Nautical Almanac clearly had a convert.18
Two more days of northeasterly winds pushed the Endeavour steadily southward on its journey into a known dead zone in the Atlantic. Near the equator, the northeast trades die out, and ships enter a region called the doldrums—which for this mission started at about 12 degrees north latitude. Ships could spend weeks lolling around with the capricious currents and breezes. As Mark Twain would write more than a century later, the zone’s prevailing characteristics are “variable winds, bursts of rain, intervals of calm, with chopping seas and a wobbly and drunken motion of the ship—a condition of things findable in other regions sometimes, but present in the doldrums always.”19
Without any real progress to track on his sextant and Nautical Almanac, Green became a weather station for nine days, chronicling the passing clouds and “squally” storm fronts that knocked the boat about but rarely moved it much forward. Banks and Solander, by contrast, were overjoyed. Windless days for them meant the Endeavour became a kind of dedicated field biology lab. On October 4, Banks commanded a pinnace expedition into the calm seas to haul in and study various jellyfish and other many-tentacled creatures (like the “blue button” porpita) as well as water bugs and an exotic swimming mollusk called the blue sea slug (Glaucus atlanticus).20
Other days, like October 11, ended without taking a thing from the ocean but just observing its inhabitants from afar. “Saw a dolphin,” Banks recorded. “And admired the infinite beauty of his colour as he swam in the water. But in vain. He would not give us even a chance of taking him.”
On October 21, just north of the equator, the next trade wind picked up. The southeasterly trades that carry ships toward South America—the continent whose shoreline Endeavour would trace till it met the Pacific—required a different tack but constituted a reliable mode of transit nonetheless. The mission was back on course. Banks pleaded with Cook to detour to Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago of 21 islands 220 miles off the Brazilian coast. The captain agreed if the winds and current cooperated. They did not.21
Four days later, as a stiff morning wind fluttered flags and carried aloft all unmoored scraps of paper and cloth, Green stood on the same quarterdeck and used his same brass sextant to find the sun 77 degrees and 39 arc minutes above the horizon. According to his calculations, this put Endeavour at 0 degrees, 15 arc minutes south latitude. She had just crossed the equator.
“After we had got an observation and it was no longer doubted that we were to the southward of the Line, the ceremony on this occasion practiced by all nations was not omitted,” Cook recorded in his captain’s journal for the day. Anyone who couldn’t prove he’d crossed the equator before, Cook added, had to make a choice: give up a bottle’s worth of his rum ration or be ducked into the sea. Some twenty to thirty of Cook’s men picked the latter option, Cook wrote, “to the no small diversion of the rest.”22
Banks chose to pay out liquor rations for himself, his servants, and even his two greyhounds. Green does not record whether he chose dousing or not. His sober and matter-of-fact diary, however, suggests he doesn’t seem the sort to have sorely missed four days’ allotment of liquor. The cost, in Green’s eyes, of a little rum seems slight, especially considering the ritual hazing of equator crossing he would have endured had he not paid it out.
Banks described the brutal hazing, a triple-ducking from the yardarm, which involved binding a sailor to a block of wood and hoisting him “as high as the cross piece [on the yardarm] over his head would allow.�
�� The dangling man would then be dropped into the ocean from the yardarm, the outermost tip of the horizontal spar that held the sails in place. “His own weight carried him down, [and] he was then immediately hoisted up again and three times served in this manner,” Banks wrote in his journal. “Sufficiently diverting it certainly was to see the different faces that were made on this occasion, some grinning and exulting in their hardiness whilst others were almost suffocated and came up readily enough to have compounded after the first or second duck.”23
RIO DE JANEIRO
November 13–December 7, 1768
To a veteran military leader like Antonio Rolim de Moura—viceroy of Brazil—the British cargo ship lumbering into Rio de Janeiro’s harbor sent a message that anyone who knew espionage and privateering could understand. Count Rolim, as Cook would call the colonial governor, had seen too many dubious maneuvers by enemy Spanish forces to trust the English officers at their word.
According to representatives from the Endeavour, this English military mission (or was it a secret reconnaissance ship?) was stopping in Rio to restock so it could sail to some Pacific island and observe the planet Venus passing in front of the sun. And this so-called British Navy ship—one that stood apart from other British Navy ships on the oceans—carried onboard a retinue of “philosophers,” equipped with advanced mapping and surveying technology, no less. Rolim no doubt thought his visitors were taking him for a fool. During the Seven Years’ War and subsequent Portuguese-Spanish flare-ups in the New World, England had proved herself a conniving and untrustworthy ally. The prime minister of Portugal had sent instructions for Rolim’s predecessor to remain vigilant against any British maneuvers in southern South America. The prime minister feared that England was working behind the scenes to take Brazil from Portugal just as it had taken France’s colonial possessions in India.24 Endeavour’s “philosophers” could just as easily have been undercover engineers on a mission to size up the Brazilian capital’s defenses. Moreover, even if England had no designs on Brazil, King George III’s ministers had financed smuggling missions that undermined the South American colony’s economy. Endeavour, built to haul hundreds of tons of coal—or other booty such as Brazilian gold—was, after all, a smuggler’s dream ship.
“The account we gave of ourselves,” Cook later wrote in a letter to the Royal Society, “of being bound to the southward to observe the Transit of Venus (a phenomen[on] they had not the least idea of) appeared so very strange to these narrow minded Portuguese that they thought it only an invented story to cover some other design we must be upon.”25
Lieutenant John Gore recorded in his diary that the viceroy viewed Banks and Solander as “supercargoes and engineers and not naturalists—for the business of such being so very abstruse and unprofitable that they cannot believe gentlemen would come so far as Brazil on that account only.”26
So the viceroy ordered Endeavour indefinitely detained, with only Cook and approved supply missions enjoying any access to the shore—and the captain was to be accompanied by a guard at all times.
“A boat fill’d with soldiers kept rowing about the ship,” Cook wrote on the first full day in Rio, November 14. “Which had orders, as I afterwards understood, not to suffer any one of the officers or gentlemen except my self, to go out of the ship.”
Cook petitioned Rolim to permit Endeavour’s crew to make a supply run to shore. “But [Rolim] obliged me to employ a [Brazilian] person to buy them for me, under a pretense that it was the custom of the place. And he likewise insisted, notwithstanding all I could say to the contrary, on putting a soldier into the boats that brought anything to and from ship, alleging that it was the orders of his court and they were such as he could not dispense with. And this indignity I was obliged to submit to otherwise I could not have got the supply I wanted.”27
Five days later, on November 19, crew and officials on Endeavour stifled their visceral reactions to the ordeal that Brazilian authorities had put one of Endeavour’s boats through. Cook had sent his lieutenant Zachary Hicks ashore to learn why authorities continued to detain the ship and to plead again for an expedient end to the unnecessary delays. Cook told Hicks to return to Endeavour upon delivering the memo, but not to let any Brazilian soldiers onboard.
Rolim refused even to accept Cook’s message. “Hicks . . . refused admitting a Portuguese sentinel into the pinnace,” Green recorded in his journal. “Whereupon the boat’s crew were drag’d to prison, Mr. Hicks made a prisoner and sent off to the ship quartered [on a Brazilian boat]. The pinnace [was] detained and his Britannic Majesty’s Colours struck by the Portuguese.”28
Banks, on the other hand, couldn’t stand being cooped up while so much flora and fauna awaited cataloging onshore. Referring to the ancient Greek myth of a king punished by the gods by keeping food and drink just out of his reach, Banks wrote to the Royal Society, “All that we so ardently wish’d to examine was in our sight. We could almost but not quite touch [the onshore specimens]. Never before had I an adequate idea of Tantalus’s punishment.”29
Knowing the penalties if caught, Banks nevertheless snuck ashore once under cover of night—and sent his servants ashore at least two other times as well. “I myself went ashore this morn before day break and stay’d till dark night,” Banks wrote on November 26. “While I was ashore I met several of the inhabitants who were very civil to me, taking me to their houses where I bought of them stock for the ship tolerably cheap: A porker middlingly fat for 11 shillings, a muscovy duck something under two shillings, etc. The country, where I saw it, abounded with vast variety of plants and animals, mostly such as have not been described by our naturalists as so few have had an opportunity of coming here.”30
Parkinson, Banks’s young artist, described one late-night foray into the Brazilian beyond. “Having obtained a sufficient knowledge of the river and harbour by the surveys we had made of the country,” Parkinson wrote in his journal, “we frequently, unknown to the [Portuguese] sentinel, stole out of the cabin window at midnight, letting ourselves down into a boat by a rope; and, driving away with the tide until we were out of hearing, we then rowed to some unfrequented part of the shore, where we landed and made excursions up into the country.”31
However, others snuck ashore for less scientific study. One American-born midshipman on Endeavour left behind a journal account of an undercover trip into Rio where he discovered that the city’s “genteeler prostitutes . . . make their assignations at church.”32
And so through the end of November, Cook continued with what he called his “paper war between me and his Excellency wherein I had no other advantage than the racking of his invention to find reasons for treating us in this manner for he never would relax the least from any one point.” Cook and his lieutenants stood flummoxed by the intransigence of the viceroy and his court. On the other hand, the viceroy’s concerns weren’t imaginary either. Just five years earlier, Brazil had relocated its capital from the booming city of Bahia to the smaller but more strategically situated Rio.33 If Endeavour had been on a mission to smuggle or reconnoiter Portuguese defenses, Rolim could scarcely have said he didn’t see it coming. The English boat and its proclaimed mission were conspicuously strange. It didn’t help matters that Cook’s pride sometimes appeared to camouflage what Rolim saw as dubious motives. Cook had told the viceroy that his journey from Madeira was brief and uneventful. And Cook had admitted that at Madeira he’d stocked the ship to the gills. So, Rolim said, “Why did you want so soon water and provisions? It could only proceed from not having loaded a sufficiency of those articles in that island.”34
As a Spanish proverb from the time put it, “I can take care of my enemies, but God protect me from my friends.”35
So England and Portugal remained symbolically locked in the friendly but adversarial embrace of the former’s ship in the latter’s harbor. Ultimately, however, Rolim could find nothing more damning than the unusual nature of Endeavour’s mission. He saw no overriding reason to justify holding Co
ok and his ship beyond December 2, when Rolim gave his blessing for Endeavour to proceed on its way.
Not coincidentally, Cook made his most extensive diary entry to date soon thereafter, on December 7, when the captain chronicled “the Bay or River of Rio de Janeira.” Rolim’s (justifiably) paranoid insistence to the contrary, Cook had no mission to reconnoiter Rio. But as if to prove that he could do it anyway, Cook took pains in his journal to describe the kind of military details the commander of an invading force might want to know about the city and its defenses.
“I shall now give the best description I can of the different forts that are erected for the defense of this bay,” Cook wrote. “The first you meet with coming in from the sea is a battery of 22 guns . . . to hinder an enemy from landing in that valley . . . whence I suppose they may march up to the town.”36
TIERRA DEL FUEGO
January 6–16, 1769
Condensed breath warmed fingertips exposed to the frigid South Atlantic gales. Captain Cook had issued all men onboard Endeavour a thick jacket named after the first European explorer who’d braved the far southern latitudes en route to the Pacific. “All hands bend their Magellan Jackets (made of a thick wollen stuff . . . call’d fearnought),” Banks recorded in his diary on January 6. “And myself put on flannel jacket and waistcoat and thick trousers.”
One of Cook’s two lieutenants, John Gore—as well as the ship’s master Robert Molyneux and two of his master’s mates—had sailed along these same straits just two years before. Their experiences at the southern tip of South America had already entered English naval lore.
The HMS Dolphin and HMS Swallow had spent four months weaving through the maze of inlets and bays constituting the Strait of Magellan. And when they emerged into the first open stretch of the Pacific Ocean in April 1767, a strong Pacific current separated the boats, permanently. So a joint expedition consisting of two British naval vessels involuntarily split into two separate voyages.
The Day the World Discovered the Sun Page 15